What is Around The Corner
Bring fresh air to your quiet life. Find a your-kind person for your next coffee break.
Around The Corner is an anonymous people community where you find your kind of strangers for a coffee break. In ATC, you initiate engagement through anonymous writing, allowing you to discover people who share a strong matching vibe with you.
How It Works
- Apply to Join. You will receive five prompts. Share about yourself, your values, and your life journey.
- Review Application. To maintain our community clean and safe, ATC carefully reviews each submission and chooses the same kind of people. As of July 2023, the acceptance rate is 82 %.
- New Member Onboarding. Every 1st, 3rd, and (5th) Tuesday, ATC adds new members to the ATC People List.
- Explore the ATC People List. Dive into the fascinating stories shared by ATC people. Submit your matching request when you find someone you want to say hello to.
- Matching Confirmation. If a mutual interest is established between you and your match, you will be notified via email.
How to Apply
Use the form below to receive five prompts and tell us more about you!
Click this link to open the form in a new tab.
Who is Behind Around The Corner
Hi, I’m CH, a founder of Around The Corner. Around The Corner (ATC) is an extended version of my previous social networking experiment, “Loud Introvert’s Coffee Table (LICT)”, which I ran between last February and April in the SF Bay Area.
I was in the Silicon Valley rat race until last year. I had a decent job, and a decent life, but was never fulfilled. In October 2022, I left corporate tech to have a 1-year break. Since then, I only focused on what I truly enjoyed, and cut off anything that I didn’t want to continue.
How Around The Corner Evolved
As part of my conscious self-recovery effort, I started my personal social networking “Loud Introvert’s Coffee Table” in February 2023. I met two strangers every week for a coffee break in SF Bay Area for two months through LICT. I shared my honest, candid experience about my quiet isolated life in adulthood, threw a few open questions, and started talking to people who responded back to me.
In two months, I got 70 people signed up, organized +25 in-person/virtual engagements, and talked to 18 of them in person. Along the way, I sometimes became a matching algorithm for people to find other fun people beyond 1:1 with me.
Later in April, people from different states and countries started signing up as well. By that time, I got +150 people on the waitlist. I loved the depth and richness of people's stories on my waitlist. I thought it was too valuable to keep it for myself and decided to help the community grow and replicate my experience for them.
What’s Next with Around The Corner
I’m halfway through my self-recovery break, and I’m feeling refreshed and recharged. I’m ready to start working on something new, and I’m excited to share my plans with you.
After seeing people from outside the San Francisco Bay Area join my community, I realized that the need for quality social connection is not unique to Silicon Valley. People all over the world are looking for meaningful connections.
My goal is to replicate my unique, positive experience of coffee with strangers for more people, and help them make it happen on their own. I would love to introduce this fun and whimsical way of building relationships and share how to add fresh air to your life on your own.
ATC is a place where you can find your kind of people to create authentic connections over a nice cup of coffee. Your next coffee break may be just around the corner. I look forward to connecting with you.
